The Milliner's Secret (42 page)

‘She must be upstairs still,’ Dietrich said.

‘But I heard the flat door open and close.’

‘Leaving her on which side of the door?’

But Coralie didn’t know, and was thinking only of wasted time. She ran out into the rain, calling her daughter’s name left and right. She went to Teddy’s door, because Noëlle might have tried to find him in his shop. But the shop was locked, the shutters down. She crossed the road to the
pâtisserie
where they used to go every Saturday to choose a tart or a cake. Thrusting open the door, she called wildly, ‘Have you seen my little girl? Anybody? Small, dark—’

Dietrich caught up with her. ‘If you wish I will order everybody living in the street to search. Everybody out of their houses in the rain, to search, on pain of arrest. Shall I do it?’

He meant it, too. Have him act like the enemy, even for Noëlle? ‘No, just help me look.’ Back on the pavement, she turned round and round, willing Noëlle to appear through the blur. Her hair was streaming, her clothes too.

‘If Ramon had found her on the stairs, would he have taken her away with him?’

‘No.’ Ramon, for all his flaws, was not a man knowingly to inflict pain. ‘He would have put her back inside the flat. It’s Martel,’ she moaned. ‘He’s got her.’

‘How would Martel have got inside your house?’

‘I don’t know! But he threatened to sell Noëlle, pass her around filthy men until she died. My girl.’ Her guts twisted and she bent forward to control the pain. ‘Please,’ she murmured through desiccated lips. ‘Please.’ A flash of memory: in a field in England, she’d demanded of a Romany, ‘Read my love-line.’

And the woman had said, ‘It is unclear. It is severed. I see children. You will kill.’

Now I understand.
She gripped Dietrich, her nails penetrating to the flesh under the sturdy cloth of his jacket. ‘Why my child, why not me?’ She saw a matching pain in his eyes, but this time it didn’t frighten her. It was like reading her own emotions in large script.

‘Why
your
child?’ He spoke in German, slowly. ‘Why
my
child, Coralie?’

She struck him with her fists because otherwise the scream inside her would rip through tissue and bone. ‘I can’t bear it. I want to die.’

‘So, perhaps you do understand. Come.’ He led her across the road, back to the flat, using the keys he’d taken from the hallstand. ‘She must be indoors. Nothing else makes sense.’ In the flat, he said, ‘You search this side of the hall,’ he indicated the kitchen, ‘I will search the other. Open everything.
Everything
.’

In the bathroom there was an airing cupboard fitted into a corner, so poky that Coralie had to roll her towels to fit them on the shelves. She opened the door without hope and saw, in the gap between the floor and the bottom shelf, a small form. Head at an angle, knees drawn up. Coralie sank down and reached in. Noëlle came out in the same shape, as if she’d been set in a mould. Coralie carried her to the lounge where she found Dietrich pulling items from a sideboard.

He came over and pressed his knuckle into the hollow under the child’s ear. ‘She’s all right.’

Voice thick with sleep, Noëlle murmured, ‘Found you, Maman.’

He put a glass in her hand. ‘Calvados. I found it in your sideboard.’

It was left over from Christmas. Coralie sat up and raised it to her lips.

‘Are you all right now?’

‘Mostly. I can’t believe how I panicked.’ Her right ankle was throbbing because running up and down the street had strained already weakened ligaments. She hadn’t known fatigue like this since giving birth.

Dietrich had lit a fire – the first in the grate since she’d attempted to burn Ottilia’s documents, but no warmth reached her. He fetched a blanket and wrapped it around her, sitting down beside her. ‘Are you able to talk?’

‘Won’t they expect you back at work?’

‘No. I don’t report to anybody in that building. But we are here, and unlikely to be interrupted unless your child wakes.’ They glanced at Noëlle, curled like a dormouse on a quilt in front of the fire. ‘Or your husband drops in again.’

‘He won’t, but I’m in no mood for chat.’

‘“Chat” is not what I have in mind. I have been waiting to tell you of my life after Paris. I had not the strength the other night, but now feels right.’

She took a slug of Calvados; Normandy apples with the innocence fermented out of them. ‘All right. Speak.’

He told her that the letter she’d concealed had been his son’s last cry for help. ‘Waldo was begging for release from military training and he must have thought I had turned my back. My poor boy. He was desperate. When I left you at the Expo, it was because I had received a telegram, stating that Waldo had collapsed.’

‘That’s why you went so abruptly.’

He signalled to her to be quiet. ‘Once, you asked me to listen while you recited something deeply painful. I ask the same of you now. The telegram mentioned an accident, though nothing of how serious it was. I raced by taxi to Gare de l’Est, got on a train that was just about to pull out, and by the early hours, I was over the German border. Nobody could have travelled faster. Even so, I was too late. Waldo was dead even before I left Paris.’

‘What happened?’

Dietrich got up, walked to the window. ‘His heart failed.’

‘That only happens to old men.’

‘It happened. The afternoon he died, the afternoon you and I went together to the Expo, he ran in the heat. He should not have run at all, the oxygen supply to his blood was insufficient. It was a boiling day and each boy carried ten kilograms on his back – considered top weight. Waldo doubled it, because he wanted to prove himself a man. Twenty kilograms. Do you know how much that is?’

She thought of Donal, staggering under the weight of laundry baskets, wheezing, ‘These weigh a ton!’ Twenty kilos . . . She bought flour in two-kilo sacks. Ten of those.

‘I tried it.’ Dietrich turned to face her, firelight flickers stripping the years from him. ‘I drove to a lake near my family home, to see how far I could run round its perimeter with twenty kilos on my back. Forty years old, that gave me some excuse, but I was near to collapse before I was a quarter of the way round. I could not have done what Waldo did.’

‘You think he put that weight on his back, knowing it would kill him?’

‘I admire my son—’ He stopped and fixed Coralie with a reproach she could not sustain.

‘Dietrich, I didn’t kill Waldo.’

‘No? That letter needed to reach me.’

Shame had nowhere to hide in her face. She looked away, saying, ‘Brownlow dropped it on purpose. He set me up.’ When Dietrich made no response, she nodded in bitter acceptance. ‘I can’t pin it on Brownlow, can I? I opened it because I wanted to know who was writing so often, who might take you away from me.’ She wanted to express her sorrow, but knew he must have heard trite condolences too often. She waited. Waited for words of forgiveness. Waited until she wondered if he’d even heard her.

At last Dietrich spoke. ‘I admire my son for choosing such a courageous and defiant—’ He stopped. Breathed deeply. ‘Such a defiant—’ A muscular spasm gripped him, pulling the line of his chest and shoulders out of shape.

She ran to him, grasping a hand that shook convulsively. Was it his heart too? Was he having a seizure? ‘Dietrich?’

A terrible sound escaped him and she saw his face twist. She drew him to her, taking his weight, while something broke inside him. At last she allowed herself to say, ‘I’m sorry. Darling, I’m so sorry.’ Then, because he didn’t throw her off or unleash any rage on her, she said, ‘I love you and I want to make it up to you.’

‘It is too late.’

‘I want to make you happy.’

‘That is beyond possible.’

‘Then at least let me take away some of your pain. Let me try.’
I can help you
, she vowed silently. I can help you mend and you – she looked to Noëlle, murmuring in her sleep – you can protect us from Serge Martel.

Becoming lovers again required several weeks of tentative courtship, rebuilding intimacy. When, one diamond-cold night just before Christmas, Coralie invited Dietrich to join her in the rustic bed, it was with a new consciousness of him as a hurt and complex man. They loved with a mute intensity because their bond had deepened, beyond words.

He had allowed her to see into his soul, as he had allowed nobody else. She had been hurt and rejected almost beyond bearing, but chose to trust again. Only when some cruelty of war thrust itself in front of them did their closeness waver.

The months marched on; the German clamp tightened. War raged throughout the world, changing in shape but never lessening in savagery. A mood of resistance grew in France.

On rue de Seine, Noëlle celebrated her third birthday, and a year later in 1941, her fourth, by which time she had stopped asking about ‘Papa Ramon’ whom she never saw any more. She had learned to look forward to visits from ‘Oncle Dietrich’, who was teaching her German and was very gentle with her. Life went on.

PART FOUR

CHAPTER 25

TUESDAY, 24 MARCH 1942

Coralie opened her eyes to citrus light. She was in Dietrich’s flat, the one that had once been Ottilia’s, in a bedroom facing the Jardin du Luxembourg. It must have been early because the birdsong was louder than the strict-time step of the sentries marching alongside the park railings. The sentries always turned off rue de Vaugirard on to rue Guynemer where, after a hundred steps, they would stamp, turn and march back. She lay contemplating the day ahead. Today she launched her latest spring–summer collection, and she ought to be up, choosing what to wear. But instead of flinging back the bed covers, she reached out and stroked a man’s taut stomach.

Just enough pressure to invite him awake.

Dietrich rolled over and took her in his arms, kissing her slowly at first, with heightening passion as he came fully conscious. He stroked the curve of her waist, her hip, fingers exploring and teasing until she was whispering his name and pulling his lips to hers.

They tangled, with a sense of mischief that came from the very private nature of their relationship. Dietrich had finally induced Coralie to relinquish her apartment and move into this building, though only after a sustained siege. She had insisted on keeping a token independence, moving herself and Noëlle into the flat one floor up, where the art collection had once been stored. Micheline occupied the ground floor, acting both as Coralie’s nanny and as concierge, with Florian Lantos, whom she’d married. Each morning, Micheline took Noëlle to a nursery school on boulevard Saint-Germain.

Noëlle remained a slight child, and would probably always be so as rationing and shortages had stripped everyone’s diet of proteins and essential fats. For all that, she was happy, delightfully opinionated in three languages. French, of course, German and American English, the latter taught her by her godmother Una, her Tante Nou-Nou, until Coralie put a stop to it.

Germany had declared war on America in December 1941, after its ally Japan had bombed the Hawaiian port of Pearl Harbor. In a stroke, Una and her compatriots lost their neutral status. Just as Una had handed over her Rolls-Royce before it could be seized, she’d resigned her flat on avenue Foch to a German intelligence chief, taking Coralie’s old home on rue de Seine, which she shared with Arkady. ‘Musical chairs for the dispossessed.’ Arkady was at last her acknowledged lover. Her SS
Sturmführer
was history, and most evenings, Una could be found at home knitting jumpers from scraps of wool – or making dinners from scraps of food.

Most people kept to their homes now, shopping in the mornings when the shelves were better stocked. At night, Paris went dark, pinpricks of light showing where the brothels and nightclubs were.

The Rose Noire thrived because Serge Martel was now one of the most powerful black-marketeers in Montmartre. The Vagabonds still played three nights a week, but Coralie never went.

Martel had not denounced her. His interest in Dietrich had mutated to a cautious truce. Coralie’s business was thriving, miraculously protected from the officious probings of German tax inspectors. She was safe, Noëlle was safe, and they had Dietrich to thank for it.